That may be a good action movie plot. Picture it. A hardened criminal holed up in a an abandoned industrial building. Armed agents surround the place. Well, at least 48 of them anyway. They send in a negotiator to talk the man down. They don’t want any more books hurt than have to….Or maybe it isn’t that great.

But the agents are real, at least as of 2018, the latest year that we have numbers for. The government publishing office is only one of way too many agencies that have armed officers.

Here are a few more that may surprise you. The EPA, NASA, The Smithsonian, The Tennessee Valley Authority (who are they), and the VA.

They are defined as “as any federal law enforcement officers who were authorized to make arrests and carry firearms.” There has been at least a couple of cases that have popped up recently that surprised me. The US Postal Service was the lead agency for the arrest of Steve Bannon and his partners in the “We Build the Wall” project.

Here is the data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

This may go a little way to explain why the Obama Administration was so ammo happy during his two terms, but it doesn’t explain it all.